As for study, study nature.  If then you fail in restraint and measure you are a “mediocre artist,” whom no artificial system devised to secure measure and restraint could have rescued from essential insignificance.  No poet or landscape painter ever delighted more in the infinitely varied suggestiveness and exuberance of nature, or ever felt the formality of much that passes for art as more chill and drear.  Hence in all his works we have the sense, first of all, of an overmastering sincerity; then of a prodigious wealth of fancy; then of a marvellous acquaintance with his material.  His imagination has all the vivacity and tumultuousness of Rubens’s, but its images, if not better understood, which would perhaps be impossible, are more compact and their evolution more orderly.  And they are furthermore one and all vivified by a wholly remarkable feeling for beauty.  In spite of all his knowledge of the external world, no artist of our time is more completely mastered by sentiment.  In the very circumstance of being free from such conventions as the cameo relief, the picturesque costume details, the goldsmith’s work characteristic of the Renaissance, now so much in vogue, M. Rodin’s things acquire a certain largeness and loftiness as well as simplicity and sincerity of sentiment.  The same model posed for the “Saint Jean” that posed for a dozen things turned out of the academic studios, but compared with the result in the latter cases, that in the former is even more remarkable for sentiment than for its structural sapience and general physical interest.  How perfectly insignificant beside its moral impressiveness are the graceful works whose sentiment does not result from the expression of the form, but is conveyed in some convention of pose, of gesture, of physiognomy!  It is like the contrast between a great and a graceful actor.  The one interests you by his intelligent mastery of convention, by the tact and taste with which he employs in voice, carriage, facial expression, gesture, diction, the several conventions according to which ideas and emotions are habitually conveyed to your comprehension.  Salvini, Coquelin, Got, pass immediately outside the realm of conventions.  Their language, their medium of communication, is as new as what it expresses.  They are inventive as well as intelligent.  Their effect is prodigiously heightened because in this way, the warp as well as the woof of their art being expressive and original, the artistic result is greatly fortified.  Given the same model, M. Rodin’s result is in like manner expressly and originally enforced far beyond the result toward which the academic French school employs the labels of the Renaissance as conventionally as its predecessor at the beginning of the century employed those of the antique.  “Formerly we used to do Greek,” says M. Rodin, with no small justice; “now we do Italian.  That is all the difference there is.”  And I cannot better conclude this imperfect notice of the work of a great master, in characterizing which